Media Studies

Except for a short survey on current teaching and research work, this paper introduces our upcoming post academic study movieSCAPEdesign.

When designing, architects and designers often use 3D simulations: plans and sections are not enough to express ideas correctly and completely.
Images and models help the designer to develop, evaluate, and communicate ideas, to him or herself and to others.
Our Department of Media Studies of the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Technology Delft (The Netherlands) encourages students to explore and combine the different available media.
Techniques such as spatial sketching, presentation drawings, physical and computer modelling, photography, video film, and endoscopy are extremely useful in the various phases of the design process and in the final presentation of a design. By combining them, students get a powerful instrument to visualise and communicate their proposals.
In combination with other media like film, imaging, etc, new communication tools, such as gsm, sms and wireless internet offer richer ways of expression in highly mediated network environments. Personal worlds can be composed and revealed through different media. In this context, students are able to describe space, in a complete different way they usually are asked to do.
And essentially, they come also to know more about composing and visualizing space, enlarging and improving in this way the amount of designing tools they can use.

MovieSCAPEdesign
Video film has always been one of the techniques students at our department can choose to present their plans, communicating their ideas by means of all kind of filmic styles. Documentaries, commercials or even thrillers are being produced to visualize their proposals.
Besides offering interactivity, digital media made linear storytelling become very popular.
The starting point is the creation of a storyboard. It also helps the students to determine precisely what they want to include, which account they want to be told and for whom the presentation is intended.

Our post master degree on movieSCAPEdesign focuses on the design of space. A combination of virtual space, fiction as usually produced for the film industry and digital architecture.
It offers a different approach to architectural design: virtual space, including among others
emotional engineering, interaction, texture and colour engineering and product design, but actual people and its clothes.
Besides the Faculty of Architecture, other faculties of the Technical University Delft participate in movieSCAPEdesign: like Industrial Design, Computer Science, Aerospace Engineering. Also the University of Drama and Film Art, Budapest, Hungary, participates in the programme.
Except for the curricular contents, the programme allows participation in projects offered by film producers.

The architectural object is mostly designed attached to a place and translated into a determined materialisation. Filmic visualisations can tell different stories, free of these limitations.
MovieSCAPEdesign offers a laboratory-like, multidisciplinary platform, to experiment and further develop design visualisation and presentation. It brings at the same time academic research and education together with business organizations. It proposes new possibilities to investigate, show and express designing and makes new, richer ways of expression possible.